ELEX engine is fine. As was Gothic 1/2 engine, as was the Risen engine. Hell even Gothic 3 engine, the only major issue was the fucking performance and loading, otherwise it was ok. Don't confuse shitty animations with engine.
Furthermore, the term "jank" is retarded beyond compare, because it is used selectively and irrationally by morons. Low budget Euro games will be called janky, but when Bethesda's crapbryo engine has the same exact jank or worse, no one says anything.
More importantly, "jank" has never made a game worthy or unworthy of playing. Jank has obviously nothing to do with the quality of writing, quest design, world design, NPC schedules, art direction, etc, but even in terms of combat, it's not as important as people think. Dark Souls games might have very tight controls and animations, but how many people playing RPGs really care about that kind of precision anyway, enough for it to make or break the game? Most aRPG combat happens on a much coarser scale, with actions, reactions, timed blocks or dodges, etc. You can do a lot with that, even if your animations and controls aren't that good.
The main issue with ELEX combat had nothing to do with jank. So what if the enemy hit you where it looked like they shouldn't, that only matters if your defensive strategy is plain movement. And that's boring anyway, who wants to walk around enemies? You should've been blocking, dodging, parrying, etc instead, which is more interesting and exciting. That's also where the main issue with ELEX was, shield blocking was OP since you could just block indefinitely, parrying only worked against enemies with one handed weapons (and was kinda weird, because it froze them forever, until next attack), and rolling to dodge got boring all the time.
If they can make parrying work against all humanoids (1h or 2h) in ELEX 2, make constant blocking very stamina intensive, and change dodging from rollling to an actual sidestep type dodge, would make the combat good imo.
